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‘Painful’ Road to Modernize National Guard

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A good story over at Military.com by Christian Lowe about the struggles that the Army and Air National Guard are going though to transition missions and to keep up the Operational Tempo of so many years of deployments.

Instead, the Air Guard is evolving to better reflect the active-duty force, with RQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drone pilots replacing F-16 drivers. There will also be a greater emphasis on cyber security operations and space, said McKinley, a career fighter pilot.

For the Army National Guard, it’s not so much a switch in its core mission as an increase in overseas deployments, he added, which is as big an adjustment as seeing the plane you used to fly retired for a UAV. The Army Guard has maintained about 60,000 Soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan for the last four years, McKinley says.